Now More Than Ever: Social Impact & Profitability Are Not Mutually Exclusive

Entrepreneurship is hard. To choose this path, there needs to be a bigger mission motivating you, which is different for everyone. The reason a company started is often not what they’re doing five to 10 years later, and that’s ok. Truly meaningful companies begin with a big problem statement, and the product develops around that. What’s important is the motivation behind why people come to work every day, why they care about doing the work they do.

What I’m convinced of now more than ever, is that social impact and profitability are not mutually exclusive. Founders who relentlessly focus on a customer, not just a product, create personally invested and motivated teams — the key to any successful and profitable mission-driven business.

Take Oportun, a CRV company that created a risk engine to score the “unscorable.” In the beginning, we didn’t know what the product would be, we just knew they had a clear mission and a passionate team to rally around it. Their focus never strayed from the customer — to helppeople with little or no credit history build a better future — and the product evolved. Their dedication to addressing a societal unmet need helped them scale into a responsible, affordable alternative lending platform that has achieved profitability. Today, I’m proud to share that Oportun has helped more than one million customers to-date, disbursed over $4 billion in loans, and has saved customers over $1 billion.

Patreon, also part of the CRV family, is further proof that social impact and profitability can go hand-in-hand. Patreon’s guiding mission is to get artists and creators paid fairly for their work, and this relentless focus has paid off. Patreon recently hit its next phase of growth, and is on track to pay over $150 million to creators this year alone. I couldn’t be more optimistic about their future impact.

DoorDash is great example of a company whose mission it is to help both everyday people andsmall businesses; from enabling restaurants to increase revenue without having to staff delivery personnel, to providing a source of flexible, part-time work to the under or unemployed. ClassPass has a similar mission to help small businesses by bringing new clients into fitness studios that otherwise may not have come in, and filling spots in classes that may be half empty.

I’m inspired to invest in founders leveraging tech ingenuity to take on real, pressing and unmet problems, not just disrupt the status quo. I urge startups to think first about their greater mission and the long-term impact they can have, and use that as the guiding force to building their product. I also encourage investors to look more closely at these types of companies, and evaluate the mission along with the product.

— Saar Gur